In an attempt to provide easy access to telephone services (and of course profits attached thereto), attempts have been made by the telephone companies to ease the way in which a caller can gain access to the telephone network. Conventionally, this is done by a caller inputting, by means of the telephone key pad, a series of numbers reflected on a credit or authorization card issued to him. This tends to be quite cumbersome insofar as the number string tends to be long.
A more recent advance in technology is the marriage of voice recognition and verification to telephony. Such technology is described, for example, in Hunt et al. U.S. Pat. No. 5,125,022, whereby a caller only needs to utter an identification number to make a call. However, as is with all voice recognition systems, there are many instances in which calls made by legitimate callers are rejected, while calls made by fraudulent callers are completed. This high rate of error is oftentimes due to factors inherent in the telephone network such as, for example, static over the telephone line, extraneous noises, the caller happens to have a cold on that day, etc.
Needless to say, the refusal to connect legitimate calls and connection of fraudulent calls are financially unacceptable. And attempts have been made to overcome these deficiencies.
One of the more recent attempts is to route a caller whose authenticity cannot be verified to an operator who then would ask the caller a number of personal questions. If the caller is able to provide the correct answers, the call is completed. If not, the caller is refused service. One disadvantage of this system is that a significant amount of time needs to be expanded by the caller, as he is being asked various questions by the operator. For legitimate callers, this can become a nuisance.
A need therefore arises for a system, and/or a method therefor, of increasing the probability that fraudulent calls are rejected, while at the same time lessening the burden that is placed on the caller to prove that he indeed is the authorized caller.